Episode 1294 Scott Adams: Trump Taxes, Humanized Mice, Irrational Doctors, and Fauci Hatred
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Content:
Dr. Fauci has a useful function
Supreme Court Justice Thomas dissents
Witch-hunting President Trump's taxes
Medical Doctors don't learn reasoning skills
Mike Lindell's freedom of speech
Befuddled Merrick Garland
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Now, I know I say that a lot, but haven't been wrong yet, have I? No way!
And how can you enjoy this even more?
Hard to believe, right?
I know, I know. It's a big claim.
But you can. It can be done.
It's almost impossible, but I have faith in you.
I know you can do it, and all you need is a cupper mug or glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
What do we need more than anything in the world right now?
A little news about Trump.
Mmm, we've got some.
Ah, now that's a perfect day.
Trump's in the headlines.
Coffee is warm.
You're all here. That's what I call a good start.
All right. Well, the biggest news is there's an unconfirmed report, which are my favorite kind, that the Wuhan lab was at one point doing experiments on humanized mice, giving them some kind of bat viruses to see if they could do it, which they could, allegedly.
Now, the first thing you need to know about any report that comes out of the Wuhan lab, don't believe anything about the Wuhan lab.
If there's one category of news that you should disbelieve automatically, it's 100% of everything they ever said about the Wuhan lab.
There's nothing to believe about that story.
Now, I'm not saying that they did or did not.
Weaponize a virus or release it or anything else.
I'm just saying that there is no credible reporting about the Wuhan lab.
Oh, there's a lot of reporting.
Some of it from our own government.
But none of it you should believe.
None of it. But here's the scariest part.
The Wuhan lab was working on humanized mice.
And I feel like they buried the lead.
Lead, spelled L-E-D-E, if you didn't know that.
One of those little trivia things you could know.
And that's a publishing talk, Burying the Lead.
Anyway, I'm a little bit more worried about these humanized mice than I am about the virus.
Oh, sure, a virus can cause a pandemic and bring the whole planet to its knees, but I don't think that's as dangerous.
As humanized mice.
Because my first question is, how big are they?
And do they look more like mice?
Or more like people?
Or is it sort of a hybrid?
Sort of a big mouse person?
And my second question is, how large can these humanized mice be?
Before it's creepy to use them for experiments.
Yeah, you can use a bug for an experiment and a little mouse.
But as soon as things get bigger, it just doesn't feel fair to use them for experiments anymore.
So I would worry that some of these humanized mice get out of the Wuhan laboratory, possibly start mating once they're outside, create an entire civilization of humanized mice, possibly five to six feet tall, Probably good at math.
They've got that human part.
And then it's Planet of the Apes all over again.
Yeah. Planet of the Apes.
Okay, no. Humanized mice just means they have some genetic thing that makes them react like people.
But it's way more fun, isn't it?
It's way more fun to think that there are rat people walking around that escaped from the Wuhan lab.
Alright. Let's talk about Dr.
Fauci. People are loving to hate on Dr.
Fauci. And I feel like that's just become his job now.
I think Fauci's job is to be the bad cop.
Doesn't it feel that way?
If you are criticizing Fauci for being more, let's say, more extreme about the likelihood of wearing masks for a longer time or whatever, if that's how you're thinking of him, You probably want to modify that a little bit.
Because it seems to me that Fauci is doing a good job of being a bad cop.
The bad cop in this example being the The one who tells you the scarier version of the story to get you to at least wear your mask now.
So it's sort of like a big ask.
So when Fauci is seemingly more extreme about how long you will wear masks, maybe to 2022, he's saying, does anybody believe that?
I mean, in your own mind, do you believe...
That we're going to wear masks that long, even after vaccinations.
And I guess Meghan McCain went after him on The View for saying that he couldn't answer the question of whether, if you had your vaccinations, let's say you're a grandparent, could you hug your grandkids after waiting for the vaccination to kick in?
And apparently he couldn't directly answer the question, wanted to Check the data and stuff like that.
Now, how big a story is that?
That Meghan McCain on The View is going after Fauci?
It's not. It's completely unimportant.
Fauci, I think, is doing something useful, even though you hate it.
And the something useful is he's the bad cop.
He's giving you the extreme version.
I don't know that that's a mistake.
As long as you have other voices out there, some optimists and some realists, I feel like you need a bad cop.
I don't feel like that's a mistake.
I don't. Because you know how human psychology works, right?
Our brains are going to triangulate on something in between the extreme views.
So he's creating an I'll say extreme.
You could argue about that characterization.
But a more aggressive view about how long we would have to wear masks and be locked down, etc.
I feel it's useful.
I do feel it's useful.
So I'm not going to be his critic.
And I'm also going to use the same standard.
I said from day one of the pandemic, all of our experts are going to make a lot of mistakes.
Because it's new stuff.
And as awesome as science is, eventually, it makes a lot of mistakes in the beginning.
That's just how the process works.
So anything that Fauci has gotten wrong, I forgive him publicly.
I think he's a patriot.
I think he's doing what he can.
And I think we need a bad cop, but I don't mind that it's him.
All right. Raul Davis tweeted something that'll make you think for a long time.
I'm going to read the tweet, or the quote.
And by the way, you should follow Raul Davis.
CEO branding is, I guess, the label he's got on this.
Twitter account, just do a search for him.
He has lots of good observations.
So he says, the strange thing about the simulation, you know, the simulation we're all living in, is that robots will realize they're alive at the same point humans realize they aren't.
Just chew on that for a while.
I don't know how many different ways you can interpret that, but I like them all.
I'll just say it again. Robots will realize they're alive at the same time that humans realize they aren't.
Just live with that for a little while.
I'm not even going to say anything about it.
Just live with it for a while.
It reminds me of something I said recently, that having complete power and having no power at all are the same thing.
Again, I'm not going to explain it.
Once you realize that that's true, you sort of realize you're at a different level of awareness, but you can't get there because somebody else explained it to you.
Until you realize that having complete power and having no power at all are exactly the same, you're going to be kind of locked where you are.
Alright, one of my favorite stories.
There are a lot of fun stories today.
Sometimes the news is fun.
Do you remember, let's say years ago when I was a kid, the news was nothing but bloodshed.
It was just death, death, death, bloodshed.
And now that it's turned into this fake news, They don't really need to tell you a lot of ugly things that will make you turn off the TV, because you would just go watch something else if you got as sad every time you watch TV. So they've tried to make the news more interesting, and they have succeeded.
So there was an AP reporter at some press conference with, I guess, the Biden administration.
Was it the Secretary of State?
Doesn't matter. Anyway.
They were talking about this Russian pipeline project, the whatever it's called, Nord Stream 2.
And the risk of this pipeline is that it would bring Russian natural gas to Europe.
Now that sounds like a good thing.
Hey, everybody likes natural gas.
Don't we? I guess not everybody.
But the problem would be that it would make Europe dependent on Russia for a big part of their energy, even more than they already are.
And so Trump had put the clamp on that.
And I guess Trump had caused a number of companies that had been working on it to withdraw.
So this Biden appointee was sort of claiming credit that Biden had put some extra sanctions on Russia.
And the AP reporter asked the question this way.
And it's the way he asked the question that's the fun part.
Because after four years of watching Trump get hammered by the press, we realize that the press has realized that they, the press, can't survive without controversy.
And once Trump is, he's not out of the headlines, but once he's a minor part of the headlines, they don't know how to keep their jobs.
Right? They're going to have to start accusing Biden of something.
They're going to have to make some problems if there aren't any there already.
So this AP reporter says this about the pipeline thing.
Let me give you the exact quote.
He said, quote, to the Biden guy, what was he?
Somebody tell me in the comments, the Biden guy, was he the Secretary of State?
I'm not sure. Anyway, the AP reporter says, you guys have only been in office for a month, right?
Are you telling me that in the last four weeks, these 18 companies all of a sudden decided to say, quote, oh my God, we better not be doing anything with this Nord Stream 2.
Lee said, he's a reporter I guess, and he goes, quote, you guys are taking credit for stuff the previous administration did, yes or no?
Don't you love this reporter?
I think it's just the way he worded it.
Yeah, Anthony Blinken, thank you.
It was Anthony Blinken. I just love the way the reporter worded this question.
And I would have loved it no matter who he asked it of.
It's just a well-worded question.
Because he's basically calling the guy out for bullshit in the most direct way.
It was just lovely. In other news, you might be aware that there was some Pennsylvania-related election court cases that got thrown out.
And the Supreme Court...
They declined to hear the case, meaning that they would not be heard by any additional court.
Now, the cases were rejected for technical reasons about standing.
So nobody looked at the details of the fraud claims, just the general picture of whether the court could look at the case at all, and the Supreme Court decided five to four to not look at them.
But that creates an interesting situation, doesn't it?
It's five to four. So, doesn't that tell us that there are four people who have been nominated and got put on the Supreme Court?
So they're like serious people, right?
Serious. I mean, say what you will about our Supreme Court.
They're all smart, right?
They're all qualified, right?
Somebody says it was 6-3.
Thank you for that correction.
It was 6-3, not 5-4.
So there were three justices who dissented.
Judge Thomas was one of them.
And here's what he said in his dissent.
He said, an election free from strong evidence of systemic fraud is not alone sufficient for election confidence.
So in less complicated language, he's saying...
Just because you haven't seen fraud, that is not proof that it doesn't exist.
Has anybody said that before?
Me, right?
That's exactly what I say almost every day since November.
I've been saying to people, you understand...
That the lack of evidence being shown to you personally is not proof that evidence doesn't exist.
You know that, right?
And then people act like they don't know that.
The news, the fake news, pretends that not being able to find evidence is proof of no evidence when you haven't looked.
Now, if you had looked, that would be a little stronger argument, right?
It's not an absolute. But if you had looked really hard in all the right places and you didn't find it, well, you still couldn't be positive it didn't exist.
But you could be pretty sure.
But we're not there because we haven't looked in all the places it could exist.
So you've got somebody on the Supreme Court who says exactly what I said, and you could pretty much get kicked off of social media.
For this opinion. Couldn't you?
Just think of this. If you worded this just slightly differently, the exact opinion of a sitting justice on the Supreme Court, if you just reworded his opinion and put it in your own words, could you get kicked off of social media?
You could. I believe you could.
For saying exactly what he just said.
Just wording it poorly.
That's all it would take.
Because the implication is that there might be fraud in the election.
Not that there probably is.
Not that it has been detected.
But there's an implication that there could be.
And further, if I read between the lines of what Justice Thomas says, that nobody looked.
So you can't make a claim either way, because nobody looked.
That's dangerous, isn't it?
He's right on the edge of losing his freedom of speech, at least in the limited way of being on social media.
Actually, I don't know if he's on social media, so it doesn't matter.
Okay. So, and then he went on, just as Thomas said, and here's sort of the money shot here.
He goes, quote, the decision to leave election law hidden beneath a shroud of doubt, meaning the public has some doubt about the election, is baffling.
He wrote, by doing nothing, we invite further confusion and erosion of voter confidence, Our fellow citizens deserve better and expect more of us.
Boom. That's exactly right.
That is exactly right.
Now, I don't know if this is a good enough reason for the Supreme Court to take the case.
If the Supreme Court rejected it for technical reasons of not having standing, etc., I don't think that's a wrong decision.
So I'm not saying that Justice Thomas has the right decision.
But he has expressed exactly what at least something like half of the citizens of this country are thinking.
He perfectly expressed it.
So I appreciate that about a minority opinion.
One of the best things the Supreme Court does as a process is they let the people who are on the losing side, if you will, write full opinions so you can see what their problem was.
This is a real good service for the country, and I love that Justice Thomas took this position.
So good for him.
In Trump news, apparently the Supreme Court, again, always in the news, It has decided that this Democrat DA, Cy Vance in New York, can get access to eight years of Trump's taxes.
So it looks like that's going to happen.
Now, we are told that that does not mean that these taxes will be public information.
Can I take a moment?
That's right. We're told that if That Cy Vance and the DA in New York gets access to all of Trump's tax records for eight years, that that won't become public, necessarily.
I fake laugh at that idea.
Of course it will become public.
Do you think there's anything more likely to become public than this?
I can't even think of anything more likely to become public.
And it's worse than that.
It won't even be all of it.
It will be like little snapshots and rumors, and I've got an unnamed source who has a copy, and then one page will appear somewhere, and you wonder where the rest of it is.
You don't have to wonder which way this is going.
Right, yeah, leaked in three, two, one.
But here's the question you must ask yourself.
What's in those things?
Now, it's my opinion.
I completely agree with Trump, which is this looks like a witch hunt.
It looks like a political, you know, vendetta.
It does not look like the justice system doing what the justice does.
It doesn't look like it.
Now, Is that because the reporting is bad?
I don't know. Maybe you've seen different reports than I have.
Here's what we know about it.
We know that the biggest part of the case, I guess there's some Stormy Daniels part of it, which seems irrelevant.
I can't believe that the payments to Stormy Daniels and the other woman are really the subject of Of the New York district attorney putting all the resources on this case because he paid some women on the side, allegedly? Definitely did.
Do you think that's why the district attorneys are after him, for that payment to the girlfriend that he didn't account for right?
I don't think so.
And let's say that the worst thing happened because of whatever they're alleging about that.
What would that be? Just a fine or something?
A small fine? So it's not that, right?
The bigger part of the case is that allegedly Trump inflated the value of his company and or properties for getting a loan, but then he deflated them for purposes of paying property taxes.
Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it?
If you don't know much about taxes and finance and accounting, And somebody told you that he had two different values for his property.
One that he only shows to the tax people, and one that he only shows to the property tax people.
You know, one for the income tax purpose, one for property tax purposes.
So that's pretty bad, right?
That sounds pretty bad.
Except, that's normal.
That's normal.
It's being reported as a crime.
But the part they've reported, now I don't know if there's something else to the story, but the part they're reporting, that's not a crime.
That's actually routine.
That's normal.
My house has a value according to the town for property tax values.
That value that the town thinks my house has is based on information I've given them when it was first built, etc.
Do you think that if I had a choice of, let's say there was something ambiguous, and it could go either way, like legitimately it could go either way if you're analyzing it, what do you think I picked?
Well, of course, I pick all the assumptions that are supportable, like I'm not going to do anything illegal, but you take these supportable assumptions that work in your favor, right?
And if you've got two sets of situations, one for property tax, one for getting a loan...
I'm sorry, I think I said before that there was two reasons, one for income tax versus property tax.
I should have said one was for the bank to give them a loan, and the other purpose was for property tax.
But that's sort of normal stuff.
Let me tell you a story that taught me a lot about doing your taxes.
Years ago, a friend of mine told me this story.
He said he was doing his own taxes, and they were kind of complicated, and there was a situation in which the IRS provided ambiguous instructions.
And it seemed like there were two legitimate ways you could calculate this thing.
One of them would make him pay more taxes, and another way would make him pay less.
And he didn't know which way to go, and he didn't want to get in trouble with the IRS, so he called his friend, who is an expert in finance, and said, I got this problem.
It looks like both ways are acceptable, according to the instructions, but one will pay more, and one will pay less.
Which one should I do? What would the friend, who is an expert, Advise in that situation to keep his friend from any trouble.
Yeah. So somebody who has experience in these fields says quickly in the comments, the one where you pay less.
Every time. Oh, somebody says there are people here who are saying pay more.
Now, everybody who's saying pay more, you pick the one where you pay the most.
You're not experienced in the tax world.
Everybody who said pay less...
is either a good guesser or you have experience in this field.
You don't go to jail for following the IRS's own instructions.
That's it. So I had the IRS called him in on this one point, which is unlikely, by the way.
I don't know if you know this, but audits are usually targeted.
So an audit is usually, I'm looking at something specific.
I'm not necessarily looking at everything you've ever done.
I'm just looking at this specific question.
What are the odds that that one thing that he would be audited on?
Pretty low, right?
Any one thing you do, The odds are low, unless it's something that creates a flag, such as a home office thing that can cause a flag.
And then what happens if the IRS calls him in?
Let's say there's a chance they do an audit.
They say, no, you should have calculated this other way.
Does he go to jail?
No. No, there's not even really any risk, because he followed the IRS's own directions.
You just picked one of two interpretations.
There's no risk there.
Now, he might have to pay a fine if the IRS says, you know, but really, this is the way it should have been.
You're going to pay a little fine on this one.
All right. The size of the risk is minuscule.
And, you know, the size, whatever he would be penalized lately is not going to change anybody's life, right?
So generally speaking, it is normal and routine to take different interpretations, even when it creates different values, one for the bank and one for property tax.
Completely normal situation.
Is your news failing you?
Because I'll bet that's the first time half of you even heard that, right?
Wouldn't you say that's the first time you've ever known that the accusation about his taxes, on the surface, it's not illegal.
There must be something below the surface that...
By the way, it's not illegal to have different estimates for the values.
It would be illegal if you did one of them fraudulently.
Now, Trump is claiming...
Accurately. His taxes are done by high-end accounting firms, so therefore the part that the accounting firm was responsible for is unlikely to be a Trump problem.
In other words, if his technique was blessed by a big accounting firm, the IRS is going to look at it and say, okay, this isn't the case of Trump trying to do something illegal, but This is the accounting firm giving him advice, which is different.
They're not going to treat that the same.
The IRS doesn't expect the business owner to be a tax expert.
So if a legitimate tax expert gives you advice and it's all documented, you as the owner are not in a lot of trouble.
You might have to pay a fine.
There's still a fine, possibly.
But you're not going to go to jail because your accountants, who are really good accountants, Made an aggressive assumption.
You just don't go to jail for that.
So, the other thing you need to know is that just because the accountants blessed the technique, that doesn't mean it's okay.
They've only blessed the technique.
They haven't blessed the assumptions that went into the technique.
That's not something the accounting firm does.
The accounting firm has to trust the company To give them the right numbers.
Because the accounting firm doesn't audit the company and make sure that the number they gave them for each of the values is correct.
They just accept them.
It is the company's responsibility to give them the right numbers.
So when Trump says, hey, this great accounting firm did all my taxes, don't interpret that as, therefore, there can't be a problem.
That just means that they've blessed the method Doesn't mean they've blessed the numbers that went into the method.
All right? Scott does not do his own taxes.
You are correct.
My taxes are so complicated.
Oh, my God.
Like, you can't even believe how complicated my taxes are.
All right. I just...
I just...
Well, it's a different story.
Um... So I would agree with Trump's characterization of this as a witch hunt.
Unless the news can give us some indication of why they're looking into him, it looks like they're just digging for something.
Just digging for something.
I don't know what they're going to find there.
We'll find out.
All right. My favorite prediction that I'll remind you of all the time is that every day that Biden is in office, Trump will look better.
The reason being obvious, when Trump's personality is out of the news, all you have is his policies.
And Biden will have a tough time improving on a lot of his policies.
One of them, for example, is kids in cages.
And hilariously, the Washington Post...
It's almost unbelievable that they have the balls to even do this, the Washington Post.
So after however many years of blaming Trump for kids in cages at the borders, they write a story about Biden's going to have the same problem, of course, because the immigration is increasing,
and he'll run out of, let's say, civilized Appropriate places to keep all the people, because there'll be too many people compared to the civilized, appropriate places to keep them temporarily.
And so they've reactivated these migrant facility for children, as the Washington Post calls it.
It's a migrant facility for children.
And there are these little, looks like these little temporary buildings that have air conditioning and walls, but there are lots of these little pods lined up.
Largely windowless, or I don't know, maybe they have a little window or something.
But, okay, maybe they're not cages, but they're boxes.
If you were kept in a box with no windows, maybe you can see now, but I didn't see any windows on them, versus a cage, I don't know if you'd have necessarily a preference.
Would you? I mean, how many kids get put in one of these boxes?
Is it better? I don't know.
So here we have Biden reproducing kids in cages, but maybe it's kids in boxes, who knows?
It's all bad, right?
So I don't want to make light of this, like nobody's making fun of people who are in bad situations, especially kids.
But it is fun watching the media try to spin this as migrant facilities for children.
Because I'm going to call everything that's a box from now on a migrant facility for children.
Yep, I got a package from Amazon today.
I took my item out of its migrant facility for children.
Oh, we call that a box.
We used to call it a box.
All right. How many of you are watching my ongoing conversation, shall we call it, online, on Twitter, with the doctors?
Is anybody watching the fun?
So, as you know, if you watched recently, I've been questioning the statistics about regular seasonal flu deaths.
This has attracted a number of professionals, doctors and nurses, to storm into my Twitter feed to call me an idiot in various ways, and to point out how little I know about the doctoring business, my complete ignorance of science, my ignoring of the experts and the data.
They are quite, quite worked up.
Some of them are very mad.
And so I decided to make them the show, As I do.
And you really should just check my Twitter feed and look for my responses to the various people who have MD or RN behind their name.
And just look at the conversation.
You're going to be amazed.
And what you're going to be amazed at is how doctors don't know how to think.
It's scary. Now, do doctors know more about medicine than I do?
Yes. Yes. Yes, doctors know more about medicine than I do.
So I don't need to be reminded of that, right?
A lot of people have felt they needed to remind me of that, but I kind of knew that, right?
But here are some of the things that they're getting wrong.
First of all, the mind reading.
So some of them are telling me what I'm doing.
But I'm not. So they're saying, oh, you're quote-tweeting me to attract all the trolls to come in, and you're a bad person, Scott, because you're basically...
It's a bad look, Scott.
It's a bad look. You're a bad person because you're just bringing all your trolls in to attack me.
No, I'm not. That's just bad mind reading.
How do you know what my motivation is?
Because you guessed? Is that how doctoring works?
You guess what people are thinking?
How about just asking me?
You can just ask me why I do it.
And I'll give you the reason.
Because my entire content, including the Dilbert comic, through every comment I've ever made on politics, they're all in the same field.
Which is showing that the experts are full of shit.
In Dilbert, I show that the management experts are full of shit.
I show that your management is full of shit.
Your training program is full of shit.
I'm basically debunking experts who know, wait for it, way more than I do.
Right? That's what I do.
For 30 years, I've built a fortune and a national reputation Making fun of experts who are clearly not thinking well.
Now, they obviously know more than I do about their area of expertise, but they don't think well, and it's obvious.
So mind reading is your first sign that somebody's not thinking well.
They could ask me why I'm doing something, and maybe I would tell them the truth, and maybe I wouldn't.
I mean, I would tell the truth.
They wouldn't know. But if you're publicly debating with somebody and then assigning them an opinion because you're a mind reader, and then criticizing the opinion you assign to them purely through your imagination, are you a doctor?
Are you a person of science?
That's the most ridiculously irrational thing you could ever do.
Now, of course, all communication requires making assumptions about what other people are thinking.
You can't turn off your ability, well, your reflex, I guess, to make assumptions about what people are thinking.
But where you should do that is in simple situations.
Somebody orders food, you might say to yourself, they're probably hungry.
I mean, simple situations, you'll get those right most of the time.
If somebody's yelling at you, you might say, hey, that person might be angry.
You'd probably be right.
But I'll tell you where you're not good at it, the mind-reading thing.
Anything complicated or novel.
Anything new, anything you haven't run across.
And they have never run across me, specifically.
Arguing about seasonal flu statistics.
It's a brand new situation.
So how can anybody know what I'm thinking in this brand new situation?
It's dumb. It's dumb to think that they can guess what I'm thinking.
Now, the real reason that I tweet quote it is not so that my trolls can come in and attack them.
That would be a dumb reason.
Why would I even do that?
But there's a doctor who diagnosed me as having that motivation, and I didn't even understand that motivation.
Like, I don't know, because I'm a bad person, I would do that?
Just to cause them some pain?
Why would I do that?
No, the reason I do it is that it's the show.
I'm putting on a show.
I've often talked about Trump knowing that he's in politics, but he's also putting on a show.
And he was the only person who really knew that.
Well, Reagan, I think, knew it.
But he knew it better than other people knew it, that the show was part of it.
As a public figure, with the cartooning as well as what I talk about in politics and stuff, I'm always putting on a show.
That's my job. So even if it's not you reading the comic or watching the live stream, I'm always putting on the show.
If you're in my line of work, you're never really a civilian if the public is watching you.
You're always putting on the show.
And so the show is showing you that these experts probably know, not probably, know a lot more than I do about their topic, but they don't know how to think.
Another one of them, and you'll see, used...
Like a weird analogy to make a point.
These are doctors who don't know that analogies don't work that way.
They're not part of reason in the traditional way that people think.
An analogy is great for explaining a new concept.
They don't have any value for winning an argument because they're just different situations.
So somebody says, oh yeah? Well, if this happened or that happened in this completely different situation, what would you do?
And I say, well, it's a different situation.
It doesn't matter what I would do in that different situation.
It would be like saying, well, Elon Musk is putting people on Mars, but what if you were mowing your lawn and you hit a rock?
To which I say, that has nothing to do with going to the moon.
So unless your analogy is telling me some point, it's not an argument.
It's just a different situation.
Doctors apparently don't know this, or at least the ones who are arguing with me.
One of them came in to tell me how dumb I was because it was clearly true that the CDC... What did he say?
...that the CDC has detailed statistics on seasonal flu deaths.
So this is a doctor coming in to dunk on me for being dumb by telling me that the CDC has detailed...
This is the exact quote from Dan Friedman, who's some kind of medical person.
And he said, I and others did explain to him, talking about me online here, that the CDC keeps detailed flu data.
No, they don't. No, they don't.
So this guy is some kind of medical expert and he's coming in to me and he doesn't even know that the CDC doesn't keep seasonal flu detailed data.
They do an estimate, but they don't count them.
They can't tell you the details of some specific person.
That's not a thing.
So here's the expert who knows less about this than I do.
I'm a freaking cartoonist.
I just read some articles and looked into some things people tweeted at me, and that's it.
And somehow I knew more about it than this doctor who's coming into the public to try to dunk on me.
Um... Here's the other question.
And then somebody else who was also in the medical field was sending me a bunch of anecdotal stories, stories in the news of individuals who died from the seasonal flu.
To make the case, and I was questioning why I don't know anybody who's ever died of a seasonal flu, when the numbers are similar to the number of people who die from overdoses and automobile accidents, but I know lots of those.
If it's the same number of people every year, Why do I always know the automobile accidents and the overdoses, but I don't know anybody who's died of a seasonal flu?
Now, that's my question, which is not a statement.
I'm not making a statement that the seasonal flu is somehow not dangerous or whatever.
I'm saying I can't understand how that can make sense.
Just explain it to me. Because there's probably something to learn in that, if you could understand it.
So here's the question I ask.
So some of the examples that were sent to me, I read the first one, and the headline is, you know, somebody died of the flu.
And then you get into it, and it's like, it had meningitis and something else.
So clearly there was an underlying condition.
So the very first example that I say doesn't exist, or I haven't seen it, So somebody sends me an example of it that exists, but I read it, and it's not.
It's had underlying conditions.
So I look at another one, and it's a young child died unexpectedly.
And I said to myself, did they do an autopsy?
When a five-year-old dies of the seasonal flu, and they say there's no underlying condition, So they died of the flu.
Is that because they did an autopsy and they have determined that there were no other causes?
It was literally just the flu.
And this kid was entirely healthy otherwise.
Do you think that happens?
No. No.
I don't know if it's ever happened.
I think what happens is the doctor says, well, this kid had flu symptoms.
The kid died.
Kids die of flus.
died of the flu, right?
Somebody said, would you ever know if it's all been faked?
Well, I don't know if faked is the right word.
I wouldn't say that. But here's my point.
What does it mean to say that a five-year-old dies of the seasonal flu when millions of other five-year-olds did not?
But let's say one does.
It's more than one, but let's say one does.
Does that mean that that kid died healthy?
There was nothing wrong with that kid until the seasonal flu took the kid out.
Doesn't it seem more likely that there was something about that kid's immune response or situation that was not quite entirely standard?
Now, if your immune system is not standard, but you don't have any challenge to it, are you healthy?
Is a bubble boy healthy?
As long as he stays in the bubble.
Because if he's in the bubble, nothing can hurt him.
But if he goes outside the bubble where normal people are, I don't want to say normal because everybody has some kind of medical problem, but the other people are.
So the bubble boy goes outside and then immediately catches something and dies.
Did the bubble boy die perfectly healthy?
Because the bubble boy was perfectly healthy yesterday when he was in the bubble.
So he goes outside and he gets the infection and the infection kills him.
So the cause of death was the infection, right?
Because otherwise the bubble boy was perfectly healthy.
Obviously there's something wrong with the bubble boy in the sense that it doesn't have the same kind of immune system as everybody outside the bubble.
I would say it seems obvious on the surface That if millions of kids get the same seasonal flu and don't die, but every now and then one does, isn't that more indicative that there's something going on with that kid that is at least non-standard?
A type of immune system that maybe hasn't been challenged yet, maybe one that's not fully developed, one that has maybe overreactive so that it It has too much of a response, which I understand is actually the problem with kids.
So, are we only arguing about the word healthy?
And is that science?
Is it science to argue over the definition of a word?
Because what I see is that somebody who has a non-standard body situation that makes them less able to survive the normal environment, doctors are calling them healthy.
That's just a weird definition of a word.
I would call them people who are unhealthy.
They just haven't been challenged yet by the environment, which will take them out.
So when doctors are arguing over the word health, they're not really arguing science, are they?
It doesn't seem like this is even good thinking at all.
And then others are saying that I'm making a claim dressed up as a question.
No. There are such things as questions.
You can have a real question about a fact that's important and in the news and doesn't make sense to your mind.
You can ask that question.
Look at the number of experts who tell me I shouldn't ask the question.
Because they believe that asking the question Is really my way of making a statement without data.
Why would they assume I would do that?
What's my payoff for doing that?
It's crazy mind reading.
You can have a question.
It's still okay.
You can go out and have a question.
But the funniest part is that these doctors tried to shame me off my point.
They tried to literally embarrass me and insult me away from my question.
Not answering the question, at least not answering it in a way that I find credible, but to shame me from even asking it because they said it was dangerous and that I'm a bad force and I'm a bad person because I'm asking a question about the data?
Really? That's where we are.
And others saying that I had a political bias.
What exactly is the political bias of wondering how seasonal flu data is collected?
Because that's Republican?
Or what?
What the hell does that have to do with politics?
I can't think of anything that has...
How is that even related?
Is there some Republican who...
Is the only one who's questioning the data on seasonal flu?
So when you see the experts completely unable to deal with simple concepts in reasoning, they're mind-reading, they're using analogies, they're trying to shame me off my point, telling me that I can't ask a question because it looks like a statement to other people, that's the quality of your experts, right?
Now, let me point out another glaring problem.
When the experts say, you cartoonist, as they're talking to me, they say, you don't know as much as we do, and therefore you should listen to the experts.
That's not true.
There are plenty of cases where the, let's say, the client of the patient knows more than the doctor does.
You want to hear some examples?
Now, do I even need to give you an example?
Have you ever been in a situation where your own condition, you knew more about it than the doctor you were talking to?
I'll bet every one of you.
I'll bet every one of you, if you're old enough, you've had a situation where there was one condition, maybe only once in your life, but at least one condition where you knew more about it than the doctor you were talking about.
All the time. Yeah, look at the comments.
Look at the comments. Now, is that because the doctor is unqualified?
No. It's because medicine is gigantic.
It's a gigantic field.
Even the doctor has to look stuff up while you're in the office.
If I go into the office, it's fairly common that the doctor says, okay, those symptoms...
And they have to type it into the computer and see what comes up.
I'll give you a specific example.
A lot of people know I had voice problems years ago.
I lost my ability to speak.
It was mysterious and couldn't figure it out.
I ended up solving it myself using Google because my doctors could not diagnose it.
How common is it That people correctly diagnose themselves when their doctor missed it.
Pretty common, right?
Now, I do take the criticism that doctors hate it when you've been doing your own Google search and you go in and you tell the doctor what you have.
I would hate that if I were a doctor.
And I don't believe that most people have the capability to do a Google search and diagnose themselves accurately better than a doctor can.
That's not common.
But it happens.
It happened with me.
So once I learned that my condition was this thing called spasmodic dysphonia, fairly rare, I became sort of an expert on spasmodic dysphonia.
Do you think that if I picked a hundred doctors randomly and put them in my room and said, all right, a hundred doctors chosen randomly, tell me everything you know about spasmodic dysphonia, how many of the hundred would know as much as I do about a condition that I wrestled with and researched and had to deal with for years?
None. It would be exactly zero.
There wouldn't be one person in the room who came close, not even close, To how much I know medically and scientifically about this one thing.
So, having spent 20 minutes looking into the seasonal flu stuff, do I know more than the doctors?
Probably. And it wouldn't even be unusual.
You can see this exact situation.
Here was a doctor who thought that the CDC keeps detailed flu records.
I know that they don't.
Because a doctor told me.
It was something else I saw online.
Other doctors looked into it, found out they'd never counted them.
It was just an estimate. So apparently doctors do not learn reasoning skills in school, and it really shows, at least with the ones who are on Twitter.
And my book, Loser Think, that you see behind me, Loser Think talks about all of these reasoning problems that I just mentioned.
So I would recommend for medical school, and maybe for any other school, that Loser Think should be a required reading.
Now one of the things you're hearing a lot of is that we should be teaching children to spot fake news.
And we should teach children how to Think and deal with the fact that so much manipulation is happening in the media.
I don't know how to say this without sounding like it's just a commercial.
But loser think is the best way to do it.
Because it's written to be friendly and easily digestible.
And it's all the common thinking errors that you see the experts use.
The doctors in this case.
And I think it should be required.
Now, of course, there's no way for you to separate that from the fact that I'm the author of the book.
And wouldn't it be good for me if everybody read my book?
Of course. Of course it would be.
But I'm also serious that it should be required.
Because you see professionals and scientists getting out of school who can't think, and how much are they going to help us without that?
All right. Mike Lindell...
He's in an interesting and terrible situation in which, as you know, he'd been questioning the credibility of the election.
He says that it's cost him $65 million in business so far for one year based on big stores like Kohl's, Bed Bath& Beyond and stuff dropping him because of the controversy.
Now, the first thing I say is I am so opposed To big companies dropping somebody's product because of what the CEO was saying.
Because while I do not think that Mike Lindell has good data for his argument, at least the stuff I've seen, I've not seen good sources for some of it, he does have a right to do this.
He has a right to...
To say anything he wants if he believes it's true.
Well, even if he didn't believe it's true, he has a right.
He does believe it's true.
I think that's obvious, right?
Wouldn't you agree with me?
We're not mind readers.
But certainly there's no indication whatsoever that he doesn't think it's true.
And if people can't say what they believe to be true in public without losing their business, I mean, this is not like he insulted somebody.
He didn't call somebody out.
He didn't attack somebody.
There's no hate speech here.
This is literally love.
Basically, Mike Lindell loves his country.
He thinks there's a problem.
He thinks that he wants to step in and fix it at great personal expense.
Great personal expense.
Now, I feel as if even if you think everything that Mike Lindell says is inaccurate, and it might be, I feel like this is just the worst thing in the world.
That this poor guy can't, you know, say what he wants in public without getting boycotted.
All right. But then, of course, he's got more problems because Dominion is suing him for $1.3 billion in defamation.
And this raises a really interesting question.
Let me say you're Dominion and you're making this decision.
Do you have to sue this guy?
I feel like you kind of have to, right?
Because, you know, just as Mike Lindell has free speech, or should have, to say whatever he wants, so long as he thinks it's true, and he's not hurting anybody directly, then Dominion also has a perfect right to defend their company and sue him for defamation.
So I feel that Kohl's and Bed Bath& Beyond and all those, it's just not their fight.
Right? You guys need to stay out of the fight.
Because this is between Dominion and Mike Lindell.
And that's a fair fight.
I don't think that Dominion knows how fair this fight is yet.
So here's the part that I like about this story.
I wouldn't underestimate Mike Lindell.
That feels like a terminal mistake.
Because I don't know how the law works, but maybe somebody who does.
I always have a lot of lawyers on these live streams.
Somebody who's a lawyer.
There we go. I'm seeing it in the comments.
Who's saying this?
Discovery process, baby.
Doesn't this open up Mike Lindell and his lawyers?
Doesn't this give them the ability to look into Dominion's software?
Wouldn't they have to have the right to audit them End to end, to be able to defend themselves in court?
Or, and this is the part that maybe you'd have to be a lawyer to know, or can the lawyers for Dominion so narrowly restrict their case that Lindell would have to prove his allegations without benefit of looking at their software?
Because that might be the case. It might be that he's making a claim that you can debunk without ever looking into the code.
In which case, Dominion is playing it right.
Now, if Dominion can avoid any discovery, if they can avoid opening their kimono and showing all their proprietary stuff, then they've made the right decision business-wise.
It's exactly what they should do business-wise if they can show their stuff, or if they can show their stuff and there's no problem.
I don't know if they can do it.
Seems impossible. Somebody's saying on Bannon that Lindell said that was his strategy, to get Dominion to sue him.
He has said that, but that's also the sort of thing you say after you find yourself in that situation.
So I don't question the fact that he may have created an accidental advantage.
I think it does put him in a stronger position than maybe the public is aware of.
Because here's the thing.
Do you think Mike Lindell sold a zillion MyPillows because he's not persuasive?
He's persuasive.
In fact, I told you once that I was going to do a live stream in which I did nothing but tell you how good his technique is for persuading.
He uses every Every known method science knows for persuasion in his commercials, and it's jaw-droppingly effective.
That's why he's so rich.
He's so good at it.
What would happen if you put Mike Lindell in a courtroom with a jury full of MyPillow customers, of which at least three or four of them are going to be MyPillow customers, right?
I mean, he sold a lot of pillows. I would love to see a lawyer versus Mike Lindell, but he'll probably have his lawyers arguing the case.
But I'd love to see him on trial.
Because while I don't...
I guess his video that got taken down, of course, in which he made lots of allegations, his video was viewed 110 million times.
The Super Bowl only gets 90-some million people viewers.
The Super Bowl. Mike Lindell got 110 million people to watch his video about the election.
All right. If you're Dominion Voting Systems, and you're going into a persuasion battle with a guy who just made a video that 110 million people watched, he had just made a fortune selling a frickin' pillow...
I've got to watch that.
I mean, you want to watch this fight.
So on the surface, you'd say to yourself, wow, $1.3 billion defamation suit.
Looks like Dominion has all the cards.
They're really going to take Mike Lindell out.
And they might. That is one of the possibilities.
MyPillow could be in a business a year from now.
That's very much a possibility.
The other possibility...
Is that they have no idea how much skill Mike Lindell possesses.
They just don't know.
Because if they think those pillows sold themselves, well, they've got some surprises coming.
So, while I do not endorse the argument that Mike Lindell makes about the election, the stuff I've seen didn't pass my sniff test, you can't take away from him his skill.
This is going to be fun, and it might be the first and only opportunity we have for a little bit more transparency about the digital part of the process.
Mike Lindell might be doing for the country one of the greatest things that's ever been done for the country, and a great personal sacrifice.
That's happening right in front of you.
I mean, it's easy to imagine this, oh, he's a gadfly, crazy guy, wasting his money, yada, yada, yada.
It would be easy to make that argument.
But also, I believe it is completely true, he's a patriot.
I think that feels unambiguously true.
Again, can't read minds, but that feels safe, right?
He's a patriot. I think that's unambiguous.
Wants to help the country?
At personal risk.
Do you really think that Mike Lindell thought he would sell more pillows by challenging the election?
I don't think so.
I don't believe there was any point he said, I'm cleverly going to raise the profile of my brand and sell more pillows.
No. He's a patriot.
He just put $65 million of revenue in just one year on the line for you.
For you. You, American citizens and also citizens of the world.
I feel like this is one of the greatest services anybody ever did for the American public at one of the greatest costs.
Now, of course, you'd put military members above this, but within the civilian world, and first responders, of course, but within the sort of suit-wearing civilian world, this might be one of the greatest sacrifices anybody ever made for the country.
Will it pay off?
I don't know. Probably not, if I had to guess.
I would bet against it paying off in terms of producing a benefit greater than the cost.
But I really appreciate this.
I really appreciate this, that he's doing this at personal risk.
And I hope it gives us more visibility into the election, and that would be one of the greatest services ever for this country.
All right. That is what I wanted to talk about for today.
I know it's a little bit harder to have fun with the news when Trump is not in it.
But maybe these lawsuits with the taxes and stuff will bring us something.
And I guess Trump is also going to be a featured speaker at CPAC. So I don't know when that is, but it's going to happen soon.
And that will give us more news to talk about.
Well, thank you. I love you right back.
Thoughts on Merrick Garland?
Yeah, I watched only a little bit of Merrick Garland talk, and he doesn't seem capable.
Did you have that impression?
I feel as if age has caught up to him.
He looks not sharp.
Let's just say that Garland is the Joe Biden of the Attorney Generals.
Yeah. Now, it could be that I'm judging his mannerism and not his brain.
In all likelihood, his brain is fine.
And just his mannerism was misleading.
But I don't know if you want an Attorney General...
Who presents himself as not mentally capable.
Because that's how he looked to me.
And I say that not as an insult.
And I do believe I would say this no matter what party he was with, right?
I don't think it has anything to do with politics.
When people speak that haltingly, and they have the sort of Joe Biden presentation...
With Biden, you could say maybe it has something to do with his speech difficulty.
I guess he had a stutter when he was younger than he's conquered, to his credit.
And, you know, maybe there's something there with Garland, too, that makes him speak in that halting way.
But it doesn't give me confidence at all.
It does not give me confidence.
Yeah, he looked. That's the word.
Befuddled. He looked and acted befuddled.
And I don't think there's anything you want less in your appointed top government officials than to appear befuddled in a situation which you've prepared for vigorously.
Keep in mind, he prepared for this vigorously.
One assumes, right?
I wasn't there, but you don't just go walking into these hearings.
You prepare. And he was prepared and still acted befuddled.
That's not a good look.
And by the way, if the Republicans decided to vote against his nomination because he seemed befuddled, that's fair.
Even if he doesn't have a background that would suggest any problem, Just the fact that he couldn't pull off the hearing itself is all you need.
I mean, you don't need a better reason than that.
All right. Somebody said Barrett just walked in.
I don't think she did. That's all for now.
I'll talk to you tomorrow.
All right. YouTubers, still with me for a moment.
Early onset befuddlement.
The central committee needs another puppet, somebody says.
Yeah. Scott, how would you know the difference between code used on election day versus updated code?
A good question. I would leave this to the programmers to answer.
A lot of things have logs.
So if there was a change in software, it might be logged in some file.
That doesn't mean that couldn't be falsified.
But it's the right question.
The right question is, is it even possible to look at an image that was relevant on Election Day?
Yeah, that is the right question.
I think it might be, but I don't know that for sure.
Somebody say, Michigan erased the logs in Antrim.
Yeah. So certainly logs can be erased.
And what would you do if you were on the jury?
Let's say you were on the jury.
I don't know if it'll be a jury trial for Mike Lindell.
Guessing it will be. I don't know.
Or does it always have to be in these cases?
I don't know the law on that.
So... I forgot what my point was.
It doesn't matter. LinkedIn takes down racist, anti-white male stuff.
Yeah, you know, the anti-white people stuff is getting a bit on a hand at the moment.
Podcast recommendations.
Tim Ferriss is probably the best podcast.
You probably already watched Joe Rogan.
You're moving toward debunking COVID deaths with your flu question, don't you?
No. No, that's what my critics are saying, and that's dumb, frankly.
That's dumb. There is...
The questions I'm asking about the regular flu and whether or not it's appropriately coded do not apply to something that apparently has killed half a million people in a year.
The whole point about the seasonal flu is why doesn't the observation fit the science?
COVID, the observation fits the science.
They say a whole bunch of people are dying.
I've heard of, personally, a whole bunch of people dying, celebrities are dying from it.
No. Anything I say about the seasonal flu does not prove anything about COVID. Very much does not.
That's what my critics say, and there's no logical connection.
Do I recommend Stefan Molyneux?
He got kicked off of social media.
I don't even know where you'd find his.
But he's very talented.
If you can take an edgier, let's say, a presentation which gives no credit to wokeness, definitely good content.
Yeah, Brett Weinstein.
I hear he's good.
The Peter Principle doctors.
No, you know what I think it is, is that I think doctors, if you become really smart at one field, I feel as though it can fool you into thinking you know more than you know.
The Young Turks, I don't recommend them, no.
Somebody's saying, I beat up Stefan.
That's not true. We did have a good conversation.
He's fun to talk to, because even when you disagree with Stefan Molyneux, his point of view is going to be well presented.
